Saturday, September 3, 2016

Assclowns of the Week #104: Make Racism Great Again Also Labor Day edition

¡Hola, amigos! Happy Labor Day weekend and welcome to the latest edition of Assclowns of the Week, with another expanded Dishonorable Mention.
It shouldn't be any surprise that summer turns into fall without getting any saner or more copacetic. This is, after all, a David Lynch/Mike Judge-scripted United States that's bound and determined to catapult us back into the pre-Civil Rights era and, if we're not careful, the pre-Cambrian Age. And the extra day this weekend gives us more time to reflect on the assclowns on both sides of the aisle that have made the grade. To wit:
Carter Wrenn (7) for reminding us of the real reason for the return of Jim Crow; Donald Trump (1, 2 & 5) for, well, being Donald Trump; Anthony Weiner (8) for living up to his name and Hillary Clinton (10) for being Albert Brooks' mother in disguise. So hop on board a taco truck at a corner near you so we can jeer this week's assclowns and much, much more!

10) Hillary Clinton

Last week, the FBI finally released an 11 page executive summary of its three and a half hour-long interview with Hillary Clinton last July. It essentially revealed the former Secretary of State to be Debbie Reynolds' clueless and technologically-challenged character in Mother. Among the bizarre revelations embedded in between the 39 times Clinton said she couldn't remember this or that were:

Relying on subordinates to take care of those pesky and complicated security issues (blame the underlings)

Colin Powell told me to use a private server (blame the black guy)

Bringing a cell phone into a secured area (SCIF), concealing its location from State and lying about it to the FBI.

Ignoring warnings from Brian Pagliano, her IT expert, about the possibility of the private servers being cloned, hacked and its contents, including classified email, getting whisked away to parts unknown...
...even after being warned by him of several unsuccessful login attempts from, again, parts unknown.
Clinton staffers at State had destroyed up to ten cell phones and other electronic devices with hammers. Only three out of 13 were turned over to the authorities.
Plainly did not know the security protocols when writing to the President at his email address (from Russia).
Remind me again why some brain-dead literary agent and publisher thought it would be a good idea to pay this scam artist $8,000,000 for her memoirs when she can remember precious little about her career under oath?

9) Marco Gutierrez

It's been long established that the runaway dumpster fire that is the Trump campaign would suck into its hair-clogged drain virtually every grifter and scumbag in the western hemisphere but few if any of them rival Marco Gutierrez. Gutierrez, like Trump, is a real estate crook who's made a handsome living scamming people out of their money after promising to save their homes. Not content with that, Gutierrez leaped into the Nexus phase of becoming a self-loathing minority by warning white America that if we're not careful with our immigration policies, there will be "a taco truck on every corner."
This would be breathtaking enough if it were said by a white Trump staffer but to hear this racist stereotype used by someone belonging to the targeted demographic is truly the very epitome of self-loathing. (This resulted in a taco truck appearing right across the street from Trump's campaign HQ in Denver).

Last Monday morning, the news broke about another sexting scandal involving the aptly-named Anthony Weiner (aka Carlos Danger). The former Queens Congressman was revealed to have sent pictures of his Little Legislator to a woman who just happened to be a Trump supporter. Now, to give this an added creep factor it so richly deserves, the images came out, including one of Weiner in a state of full tumescence... (Drum roll, please)... while his four year-old son was sleeping next to him. (Crash cymbals)
This was quickly followed up by the news that Weiner's wife, the long-suffering Huma Abedin, has separated from him. While no one with a semblance of common sense could blame her for doing so, one also has to speculate how much of this separation was inspired by political expediency to protect the Clinton campaign of which she's a major part.

7) Carter Wrenn

Every now and then, some right wing nut job out of North Carolina will spill the beans and tell the truth about restrictive Voter ID laws. Three years ago, the curtain was pulled back by former Buncombe County GOP Chair Don Yelton on The Daily Show. Then this past week, an even bigger fish in NC politics, GOP consultant Carter Wrenn, clarified why Voter ID laws were actually put in place. And you can be relieved to know, people, it wasn't based on racism at all! Hell, it wasn't even about the non-existent scourge of voter fraud. It's because them there darkies won't fall in line and vote Republican.

“Look, if African Americans voted overwhelmingly Republican, they would have kept early voting right where it was. It wasn’t about discriminating against African Americans. They just ended up in the middle of it because they vote Democrat.”

Here's the problem: Since the Voter ID law that had been partially struck down by a court disproportionately targets people of color (the judge's rationale for striking part of it down), then it is racist. And lest you doubt Wrenn's motivations for pushing this draconian bill, take a little trip down Memory Lane, specifically to 1990 and the infamous "white hands" video he had crafted for Jesse Helms.
Helms ran against an African American Democrat named Harvey Gannt.

6) Our Revolution

(Tip o' the tinfoil hat to faithful reader CC for this wonderful catch.)
The Blue Dog front group Our Revolution was supposed to be, and is still disingenuously branded as, the Nexus phase of Bernie Sanders' revolution. Instead, it was immediately turned into just another outlier of the Clinton campaign/Tammany Hall 2.0 corporate machine. They pretty much proved it on the 25th of last month when "former" Republican Mike Derrick was invited to a Our Revolution shindig and Matt Funicello wasn't. So what's wrong with that?
#1, Derrick ran as a Republican for NY 21's congressional seat just two years ago and now is cynically running as a Democrat knowing that he doesn't stand a chance against Republican incumbent Elise Stefanik. Funicello is running as the Green Party candidate yet got snubbed in favor of the recently converted Derrick. And why? When Funicello asked, he was told his campaign was "too divisive and aggressive."
Which is pure Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Hillary Clinton. In other words, it's Our revolution, bitches, not yours, especially if you're as progressive as we like to bill ourselves as.
These right wing cunts are at best a hideous palimpsest of Bernie Sanders' original vision. And if their "revolution" to cynically court disaffected Bernie supporters begins with screening out and isolating the only progressives running for office, then it's not a revolution but a mere appendage of the Tammany Hall 2.0 so capably represented by Hillary fucking Clinton.

5) Donald Trump

This is how it must have gone between Trump and President Nieto in Mexico:
"I wanna build a wall and make you pay for it."
"How are we supposed to do that?"
"Stiff the laborers. That's how I do it."
It's no wonder that, when his promise to soften his stance in immigration lasted for all of one hour, several key Hispanic Republicans fled the Trump campaign. I don't know what the hell these Hispanic were thinking when they trusted Trump for even a minute but now they're all butt hurt and feeling betrayed by him despite his saying at the very start of his campaign that Mexicans were rapists. And this is what you get after climbing into bed with Republicans: Butt hurt.

Then before leaving for Phoenix, Trump had these fashion and grammatical abominations made (I wonder if the Mexican sweatshop gave him a good wholesale deal) and then put them on the heads of fellow racist hacks Rudy Giuliani and Jeff Sessions in kind of the same spirit we draw penises on the faces of our passed-out friends. "Make Mexico Great Again Also"? Who's writing this shit? Joe Chadwick?

4) PBS

I didn't know PBS was an acronym for Plutocrat-Backed Silence.
On August 23, Dr. Jill Stein sat down for a PBS interview, which should have been a major coup for her considering how little attention she's been getting from television media. But then a strange thing happened on the way to full transparency: When asked for a closing statement, Stein went on at some length about Hillary Clinton and Ken Salazar's endorsement of fracking and that portion got cut out of the broadcast and the Youtube video. It's shocking this would occur on national TV but especially on PBS, which is supposed to be funded entirely by the public. But is it?

A few years ago, there was a mini scandal over a documentary entitled "Citizen Koch" that was to be put out by that very same PBS until the PBS-funded production company ITVS decided to kill the documentary under the absurd reason they "didn't like it." More like David Koch didn't like it, since by that time he'd donated $23,000,000 to public TV and sat on the board of two PBS stations (WNET in NY and WGBH in Boston). So why would David Koch take offense at Jill Stein and her comments on fracking? Oh, yeah, right...
So thank Matt Orfalea for this revealing Youtube video.

3) The Puffington Host

The diverse HuffPo editorial staff in which everyone actually varies three inches in height and almost 10 pounds in weight.

We've known for many months that the PuffHo, as I call it, has been in the tank for Hillary Clinton. What we didn't know was how viciously they've been defending her from public scrutiny let alone criticism. David Seaman found that out the hard way when he'd posted two articles questioning Hillary Clinton's health then immediately had his access revoked and account terminated. His two articles also disappeared into the memory hole. Here's a screengrab someone took before Winston Smith's sister went to work.

Now, I don't know if it's even possible to fire someone who'd worked for free in Arianna's plantation but if it is, then Seaman got fired for simply doing his job as an online journalist. Because the people of the United States don't have the right to know the state of health of a woman who's very close to the presidency. But oh, no, this isn't censorship. It's, uh... content management in much the same way that eugenics is merely family planning.

2) Donald Trump & the MSM

One of the most onerous tasks of the politically engaged person is to endure the despicable but still necessary political evil of triangulating. In the nearly 16 month-old history of the Trump campaign, that was never in more evidence than his speech today at the Great Faith International Ministry in Detroit. It began bizarrely when black parishioners put on Trump a rabbi's prayer shawl and then it just kept getting more bizarre.

At one point, Trump seemed to compare himself to Lincoln, you know the Republican that freed the darkies, and that since blacks can't be counted on to be smart enough to vote for their interests, they should vote for Trump ("What the hell have ya got to lose?!"). And this first address to a predominantly African American audience (one he was obviously pressured into) was, predictably, spun by the mainstream media as Trump's "black outreach." Here's the problem: It wasn't so much black outreach as white outreach since Trump was using the mostly black audience as window dressing. According to Greg Sargent, his real game was in trying to woo not black but white votes, specifically those who are college educated, undecided and may be a bit jittery about those pesky rumors that Trump may be a teeny bit racist.

And then the MSM confirmed how utterly worthless they are by keeping tight shots on Trump so the viewers at home wouldn't see how empty the church really was:

Say what you want about Trump: He keeps the parishioners coming in. Sort of.

1) Donald Trump and Steve Bannon

When the Donald hired Breitbart chief Steve Bannon to be his campaign's CEO, many interpreted that as Trump reshuffling the deck chairs on his Titanic of a campaign. But in light of the disclosures about Steve Bannon since that day, his hiring has come to be viewed as Trump grabbing the wheel out of the captain's hands and steering it into the iceberg.
And the thing about Trump's hiring choices is that they're not only bad choices but calculated ones. And he brought to the top of his campaign an antisemitic right wing nut job from Breitbart's news "empire". In a 2007 divorce court deposition filed by Bannon's ex wife, she also revealed he beat her and had even illegally filed to vote in Florida (Yeah, GOP, let's talk about voter fraud for a minute). So this guy Bannon is as queer as a flying pig but what hiring choice do you expect of a guy who's so disingenuous even his double-woven hair is dishonest?

Dishonorable Mentions

Sarah Palin

Perhaps she ought to first learn how to crawl then walk before running.
Sarah Palin recently had a medical emergency when while "rock-running", she fell on her head (the mountain's OK, in case you're wondering). While that in itself isn't funny, what was funny was Palin taking to her Facebook perch and shitting this all over cyberspace, basically making her head injury all about Hillary Clinton and making so little sense even her own FB friends didn't know if she was being serious or sarcastic.
People, friends don't let friends suffer head injuries and drive on the information superhighway.

Larry the Cable Guy

It looks as if Larry the Cable Guy is very comfortable being the Joe the Plumber of this election cycle. Tuesday morning, "Git'R'done" Larry appeared on Fox and Frauds to weigh in on Colin Kaepernick and Hillary Clinton. In the world according to Larry, athletes shouldn't make a principled stand unless they're winners, which didn't exactly help two medal-winning sprinters in the Mexico City Olympics. And, while I agree Hillary Clinton will end the US as we know it, if you need to have your political opinions informed by a rejected Hee Haw character, then perhaps you should forfeit your right to vote.

2 Comments:

Wow, how diverse is HuffPo's editorial team. Do I see a couple of Asian faces in the back? Maybe a couple of light-skinned Latinas in the front? Between all of them they probably can't spare two drops of melanin.

Also, where are the men? I know HuffPo has them because its "About Us" page has male names among its editorial staff.

HuffPo didn't only give Seaman the shaft; it did the same to Tony Brasunas, whose last piece for it (dated July 19) was taken down after only 12 hours, although the link to it still exists (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/tonybrasunas-672). You'll just come to a page stating that the article is no longer available.

However, Brasunas was able to post it elsewhere: https://medium.com/@tonybrasunas/the-deeper-reason-independents-and-progressives-will-not-support-hillary-clinton-db79a10b23c7#.d0fviubt6.